Increasingly, more practices are moving from paper to digital records. While traditional paper charts can still be used by anaesthetists to record which drugs are going to be used in medical procedures, paper-based systems do not comply with S8 medication management protocols for reconciliation of used and discarded narcotics.

With an Anaesthesia Information Management System (AIMS), there is full compliance. An AIMS can also boost efficiency, enhance patient safety and outcomes, and heighten financial performance.

Increasing clinician efficiency

Decision support in this system alerts anaesthetists to potential drug interactions and records medications administered during anaesthesia. It sends details to the EMR as closed orders, so that decision support can act on this data. It alerts, records, and audits the optimum time to give intraoperative antibiotics and also templates evidence-based practices for anaesthetic medications, based on procedure type, duration, and patient variables.

Improving patient safety and outcomes

An AIMS enhances patient safety by using myriad data to measure clinical outcomes. It also helps identify clinical practices that lead to poor outcomes. For example, the non-identification of anaesthetic risk factors can lead to hypothermia in the post-anaesthesia care unit (PACU). Data provides evidence-based guidelines, and identifies the best available outcomes, protecting against downstream transcription errors. It would be almost impossible to perform equivalent statistical analysis using paper-based systems.

Additionally, this technology enables preoperative assessments to use risk calculators to identify potential complications, which can delay surgery. During surgery, an AIMS uses evidence-based guidelines to mitigate risks, automatically sending feeds from anaesthetic machines and physiological monitors to an electronic anaesthetic chart.

Recent research at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, which was using an AIMS, suggested increased monitoring was useful. The study found "an increased rate of intraoperative temperature monitoring led to the identification of a previously under-recognised cohort of hypothermic patients."

Automatic monitoring during operations can also help anaesthetists focus on patient care and manage critical issues. It is, of course, vital to monitor patients after surgery, too, and this software flags specific criteria patients must meet before being moved to the PACU and other wards.

Enhancing financial performance

Financial performance can be improved with an AIMS, as anaesthetists can raise orders for Anaesthetic Consulting Fees and send a DFT P03 electronic message to billing systems, which records types of anaesthetic, duration and ASA score. Data is then sent electronically to the billing system for same-day, band-fee calculations.

In private hospitals, fees represent a significant part of hospital revenue. Current Australian Medicare telehealth rebates can be used for private patients, too. In public hospitals within Australia, approximately 10–15% of patients have private health insurance. Public hospitals can use this system to recover these fees.

Health systems without an AIMS could be penalised twice because they may lose revenue from private and public hospital patients. If hospital beds are occupied for longer periods than expected, due to complications from anaesthesia, it may not be possible to treat additional cases from public hospital waiting lists.

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To find out more about how an AIMS can benefit your organisation, click here.